


when the moon was a silver sliver (and the Mall was as dark as it ever would be)

by Ashling



Category: The Godfather (1972 1974 1990)
Genre: M/M, Relationship Study, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-21
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:20:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28209693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ashling/pseuds/Ashling
Summary: Sonny, Tom, one bed: a brief history.
Relationships: Sonny Corleone/Tom Hagen
Comments: 4
Kudos: 26
Collections: Writing Rainbow Silver





	when the moon was a silver sliver (and the Mall was as dark as it ever would be)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Shrineofstones](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shrineofstones/gifts).



The first time happened when they were living temporarily in the small house with the blocked chimney, dodging Marrone's men, and the room Tom and Sonny shared was small enough to be a closet, with barely enough space to walk between their two cots. In the night, Sonny would sometimes wake up and know without light that Tom was awake, and he wouldn't go back to sleep until he heard Tom's breathing even out. That was enough for a little while. Then the anniversary came around, and Tom's face that day looked pinched, older. That night he sobbed into the crook of his elbow. Sonny had seen men die and still never heard anything so desperate. He tried rolling over to give Tom privacy, but it didn't stop. Tom was gasping like he needed air between sobs, like he was choking, and that was it, Sonny threw the covers off and crawled over.

He tried to sound like one of his uncles, how he knew men dealt with crying children, adult and jovial, half-insulting, half-reassuring, _c'mon, Tom, what's the matter,_ as if he didn't know, as if he didn't already know it was a mistake, and Tom burrowed his face down deeper into his arm and with his free hand, pushed Sonny's shoulder, hard, the way he never touched Sonny, never touched anybody, wasn't a fighter, Tom, that was what Sonny was for—except when Sonny went to pull away, he found that Tom's hand was fisted in his nightshirt. He couldn't leave even if he wanted to. He put his hand somewhere on Tom's back, found out where he was exactly by the cut of a shoulder blade, pressed in gentle and tentative like he never was, cautious like he never was, wasn't a lover, Sonny, not yet, not in those days. Tom shuddered at the touch, but he didn't move away, and Sonny came in closer, awkward under the blankets, until in one fierce movement Tom took away his arm—Sonny caught the faintest glint of window-light on his wet cheek—and buried his face in Sonny's neck. After that it was easier. He thought he would wait until Tom went to sleep, then go back to his own bed, but he fell asleep first and woke alone.

Tom always left first. He seemed to be making a point of it. But more often than not, he was the one who came into Sonny's bed, after that, so Sonny accepted there was some kind of balance, and stopped trying to understand it. It wasn't bad days only, though early on he thought it might be only for comfort. But Tom filled out and started to smile around the house, even when there were other people, even when rooms were full and everything was only in Sicilian. Not grins, not much laughter, never any jokes, but Sonny liked it that way, liked the private quality those smiles took on because hardly anybody else noticed them, because a flick of the eyes was enough to let Sonny in on whatever joke he was thinking. Times were good and getting better, but they kept ending up in the same bed, tearless, sometimes with Sonny's arm across Tom's chest. Times were good and getting better, which meant a new house, and not just a house, a house on land with other houses being built, something that could become a tiny village unto itself, and of course individual rooms for the two of them, and a board that creaked in the hall. So Michael likely knew, and it happened less often, but still. Sonny's arm, Tom's chest. The familiar warm weight of him, the way Tom would turn in his sleep until some dim part of him felt settled again, and then he'd go so still that Sonny would put his ear up close to Tom's face, just to make sure he was breathing. Waking up to nobody there.

Law school wasn't so bad. Sonny would think of things he wanted to tell Tom, and forget them, but that was bearable, that time away; it was when Tom came back home that the air around him seemed to simmer, not that he seemed to notice. He was milder than ever, quieter than ever, on his way to being finished-off, like raw wood turned to something expensively sheened and elegant, and Sonny knew him still, but how much, he didn't know. In those summers, he found excuses to stay under his father's roof, waited up like anxious girl by the telephone, hated himself for it, waited some more. Sometimes Tom came to him. Sometimes he didn't. Sonny was finding it harder and harder to ever go to Tom; the asymmetry of it itched at him, made him feel restless and jumpy and there was no one to fight over it, no path to follow. He always ended up shouting before noon. He knew how bad it was. He had never been unaware of his own weaknesses, really, just aware of how much he could get away with. He was going to miscalculate one of these days. Till then life was good to him even if Tom wasn't.

Even without a wife, Tom got a house of his own, built on the Corleone Mall. Made the down payment himself, or at least tried to—there had been an argument, something vanishingly rare between Tom and Pop, something private, so that Sonny didn't know the details and was almost afraid to ask. He himself had a place on the Mall and two apartments in the city, with a woman in each apartment, and they were fine women too, only the best, but somehow when the moon was a silver sliver and the Mall was as dark as it ever would be, he found himself creeping from house-shadow to house-shadow like a burglar, letting himself into Tom's house with lockpicks. He was affronted, but not surprised, when he found the door was locked. It was in line with the way things were going lately. He wanted to shout up the stairs, give Tom a few seconds of wondering, stomp up heavy-footed (and he _knew_ he couldn't name how he had been insulted, he only knew that he had been)—but then that would ruin all his efforts at quiet so far. He paused at the door. He knew everything about the way Tom sounded when he was asleep—deep silence, nightmares and the aftermath, the faint snuffling in exhales that barely passed for a snore. He knew this sound too. You can't live that close for that long with a man without knowing. Anyone would have known.

Perhaps not just anyone would have opened the door, but Sonny had put in too much work at this point to allow himself cowardice now. And he wanted to see. He'd heard it so many times, but he hadn't seen since, when, 1933? When the door opened, Tom at least had the grace not to fake shock. They didn't pretend with each other, aside from false good spirits, which was shorthand for _leave it alone._ There were many ways they told each other to go away, but Tom wasn't using any of them. He was lying, half-propped up by a squashed pillow, barely visible in window-light, but clearly naked. Clearly something that should be put in a museum, except that the slick slide of his hand on his own cock was probably not suitable for public viewing. Sonny wasn't even sure if it was suitable for private viewing. He was already getting the itch to touch, but even if Tom didn't end up slitting his throat in the middle of the night for it, he didn't know where to begin—what it would be like if there wasn't perfumed hair and giggles and yes, he did have a type, and that type was a woman he knew exactly how to handle. Tom he didn't know how to handle anymore, and he was starting to think he never had in the first place. But God. Look at him.

He didn't have time to feel himself caught or clumsy; he felt suspended in air, transfixed. He wasn't being told to leave, which was good enough, until Tom spoke, voice a shock in the stillness, unexpectedly raspy: "Are you just gonna stand there?" which sounded so unlike Tom, who laid his challenges out proper and subtle, not—whatever prelude to a street fight this was. He sat on the edge of the bed and thought, absurdly, that his shoes were still on, and he should do something about it—he was just about to bend and untie them when Tom's hand was suddenly on his thigh, fingers digging in, and that much he understood. That much he'd done before.

He knew how to get out of his clothes as fast as possible and he did, almost tearing a button in his hurry, and then this—fuck—bending over Tom in the dark, this familiar gesture in the wrong house, slanting his mouth over Tom's, the way Tom opened his own mouth quick and eager and pushed up into it. The wanting pulsed the same inside Sonny, and Tom made the same sounds—low moan when Sonny thumbed over a nipple, begging, even, when Sonny wrapped his hand around Tom's cock and stroked achingly slow. It shouldn't have been simple, but it was. He'd waited for it so long. He wanted everything at once, he wanted his hands everywhere, he wanted to fuck Tom in every way he knew and then some he was pretty sure he'd just invented, but at the end of the day, Tom kept making those delicious sounds, like he was helpless, kept slipping his tongue into Sonny's mouth, kept holding on so hard to Sonny's hair it hurt. When Tom came, he moaned so filthily that Sonny kept stroking him, kept wishing he'd get a replay, but then it was only whimpers and twitches and finally Tom batting his hand away. Sonny tried to see his face in the light, and Tom's eyes were closed, but Tom said, "In a minute, I'll..." and let that drift off into tantalizing silence.

Sonny wasn't one for waiting, so he touched himself instead, his hand slippery already, and didn't stop, not while Tom picked himself up off the bed, not while Tom crawled down his body, shoulders moving strange like a hunting animal's, not until Tom firmly took his wrist and pulled it away. As he hovered over Sonny, Sonny felt a kind of panic he'd not felt before, not in bed, not with sex, a stab of certainty that this was going to be over any second now, that he had made a mistake somehow, that he shouldn't have—and then Tom lowered his head. It took everything Sonny had not to jerk up into it. His neck strained from the effort and his fists went white-knuckled. But he stayed still as Tom figured it out, as Tom opened up wider, as Tom swallowed him down sweet, liquid vise. Sonny wasn't a kid anymore, hadn't been for a long time, but all it took was a low hum in Tom's throat, the way he hooked Sonny's leg up over his shoulder and held him steady. Sonny had never been held down in anything but a fight and never known how good it could be, when it was this, when it was Tom. He didn't last long after that.

When he came to, Tom was cleaning himself up with a wet cloth, then came over and did the same for Sonny, careful and thorough in a way that had Sonny drawing him down for another kiss, lazy this time, but greedy. He wouldn't let go. Finally Tom threw the cloth into a corner of the room and climbed back in; there was something starkly new about their bare bodies pressed together that was different even from Tom's lips around Sonny's cock. It was the mix of familiar and unfamiliar, everything he'd already felt and everything he'd always ignored feeling, and although he knew better, Sonny put his arm across Tom's chest. He knew he was a heavy enough sleeper that he would not feel it in the morning if Tom climbed out from under—when Tom climbed out from under. But he had to try.


End file.
